Internship: Planning for the Ongoing- Projects and Time in Small House Museums

By Emsie Lovejoy

In the fall semester of 2023, I had the pleasure of undertaking an internship at the Gibson House Museum, a Gilded Age townhouse in Boston’s Back Bay.  Based upon my interest in working with their physical collection and learning about their collections management system, curator Meghan Holmes suggested that I might tackle the project of designing room guides for their internal use.  The room guides would act as a resource for Gibson House tour guides and staff, to quickly find answers to visitor questions about objects in the collection.  It was something that had been on the “want to do” list for a long time but hadn’t made it to the top of the list yet.  The Gibson House Museum staff is quite small, and there is no shortage of projects in the works on any given day.  One of the first big lessons for me was that things happen slowly at small museums like this, and they can’t be rushed. 

One of the most important aspects of the project was that it was always intended to be ongoing.  The expectation was never that I would come in and do all the room guides.  Rather, I was going to lay the foundation, but after my semester the GHM would still be adding to them.  So, it was crucial that whatever I came up with be both easy to update, and easy to replicate: the systems I designed would need to be straightforward enough for someone else to pick up where I left off, with a minimal learning curve.  

I made a few trial runs at formats that were ultimately too difficult to reorganize before I was forced to admit that what I was really trying to do was reinvent the spreadsheet.  So, I made a spreadsheet.  I moved the process to Google Sheets with the idea that the text could be finished and arranged there and then migrated to a polished document with the photographs once it was finalized.  However, since images can in fact be included in Sheets, and it offers endless opportunities to add, remove, and re-arrange without creating extra work, we ultimately decided to leave the final RG in spreadsheet format.  Aesthetically it might have been more satisfying to take that last step of copying things over to a different format, but realistically it would have added a lot more work for me, and whoever picks up the project next.

The other reason flexibility was so critical to this project is that we couldn’t know at the beginning how many things that seemed obvious would need to be rethought.  During the process of creating the final format, Meghan and I had many conversations about identifying the most important characteristics of an object for the purposes of a finding guide.  Yes, everything would have a photo, but would it be faster to find a specific object if it were organized by category? If so, what were the categories? Or should it be ordered by location in the room? If by location, was a list format actually the most useful, or should we find a way to map the space? Was there a way to organize objects according to how frequently visitors ask about them? As we tested out different classifications and configurations, it quickly became clear that the ease of using a program that would sort material for us was the only way to go.  If every time we had wanted to try a new method of categorization I had been reorganizing manually, we simply wouldn’t have tested out as many possibilities.  Trial and error gave us, I think, an excellent final product, but without that flexibility trial and error would have been out of reach.  Presumably, this will continue to be a factor for the next people working on this, since one of the major decisions we made was that the format should be approached on a case-by-case basis and adapted to the needs of a given space, rather than trying to impose a single structure on every room in the house.

To that end, rather than a rigid blueprint, what I finally produced for the GHM is more like a menu.  The plan is to place binders in each room, in out-of-the-way locations where they will not be especially noticeable.  Each of the binders will include:

1. A list of Top 5 Objects, those which prompt the most visitor questions
2. Full room guide organized by category

Depending on the room and the specific needs of the space, the binders may also contain:

3. Maps of object-dense areas, with the corresponding Map Keys
4. Lists divided by region of the room, to be determined on a case-by-case basis
5. Lists of types of objects (i.e. silver pieces in the Dining Room)

All of the paintings will be represented on a separate, visitor-accessible sheet, to cut down on the amount of material to sort through in the room guides.

Knowing that I would not be completing the room guides project, I created online templates for each of these ‘menu’ items, which I have handed over to the GHM.  I also produced a detailed instruction manual for their use and some context for thinking through the sorts of questions we confronted throughout the process.  A further consideration in making these materials is how they will be used going forward.  The room guides are likely to be something that gets worked on in fits and starts when they have the time between other projects, so we wanted these systems to be straightforward enough that one could come back to it without having to relearn anything significant.

At the end of my semester with the Gibson House, I felt entirely satisfied with the materials I handed off to them.  I finished one room guide that uses all of the elements listed above, so we all got to see the finished product and get a sense of how to use it, and the responses that I received from the museum staff were extremely positive. 

References:
“Room Guide,” Longfellow House – Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.  Accessed September 2023.